Visit
to the exhibition at the Musée du Louvre (until 15 Jan.) with Chris Boïcos.

François I’s taste for Italian
art is well known; his patronage is essentially identified with the creation of
an Italian school at Fontainebleau, but his reign was equally marked by a
vigorous tradition of Dutch artists settling in France.

The best-known Northern artists
active in France during his reign—Jean
Clouet and Corneille de La Haye known as Corneille de Lyon—were portrait specialists. The exhibition offers
an exceptional presentation of the painted oeuvre of Jean Clouet (only around
twenty panels are confirmed to be by the artist), as well as a few rare
preparatory drawings, sketched from life.
As well as Paris, the Norman, Picard, Champagne, and Burgundian centers were
swept by a wave of Northern influences—from Antwerp, Brussels, Leiden,
Haarlem—in the art of manuscript illumination and religious painting. Recent
research has gradually revealed painters
unjustly consigned to oblivion: Godefroy le Batave, Noel Bellemare, Grégoire
Guérard, and Bartholomeus Pons are only some of the artists who excelled in
media as diverse as illumination, painting, stained glass, tapestry, and
sculpture. The king made extensive purchases of tapestries, gold and silver objets d’art, and Flemish paintings. A
whole segment of the French Renaissance
is now resurfacing; and this exhibition sets out to reveal its many and
varied facets, its extravagance, and its monumental character.

Place: Passage Richelieu in front of group entrance. Enter through great arch on rue de Rivoli
opposite the exit of Métro
Palais-Royal-Musée du Louvre.

Founder
along with Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck of Fauvism, the first great movement of modern art in Paris at the
opening of the 20th century, Derain has not had a major exhibition in France
since 1994.

This
exceptional exhibition brings together all of the famous paintings painted in
the company of Matisse in Collioure
in the summer of 1905 and the famous views
of London painted for the art dealer Vollard in 1906. Seventy canvases and
numerous watercolors, sculptures, ceramics and prints follow the artist’s
evolution from his early Fauve phase to the Cézannian and Cubist experimentations of 1908-14 and also his close relationships
with fellow modern pioneers Matisse, Picasso and Braque.

Thursday 30 November, 12:45– 2:15 pm: Rubens, Portraits of Princes

In 1621 the widow of King
Henri IV, Marie de Medici invited
the art star of her day, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens to paint the
great cycle of paintings celebrating her life for her new Luxembourg palace.

Set next door to the palace,
the current exhibition illustrates this famous relationship with numerous
portraits of the Queen and her family - King Louis XIII, Queen Anne of Austria
- as well as the kings, queens and princes of Europe related to the Bourbons and the Medici: the Hapsburgs,
Stuarts and Gonzagas.

This is a unique gathering of
grand portraits of the Baroque era featuring also paintings by Rubens’ famous
contemporaries, Pourbus, Champaigne, Velázquez and Van
Dyck.

Wednesday 6 December, 11:40– 1:15 pm: Dior, Dream Couturier

Visit
to the exhibition at the Musée des art décoratifs (until 7 Jan.) with Dimitri Papalexis.*

The Musée des Arts
Décoratifs is celebrating the 70th
anniversary of the creation of the House of Dior. Our fashion specialist,
Dimitri Papalexis, will take us through this lavish exhibition tracing the
history of the House of Dior’s through its founder and the illustrious
couturiers who succeeded him: Yves Saint
Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and, most
recently, Maria Grazia Chiuri. On
show are over 300 haute couture gowns
designed between 1947 and the present day, but also atelier toiles,
photographs, illustrations, sketches and fashion
accessories - hats, jewelry, bags, shoes and perfume bottles. Christian
Dior’s love of art and museums is also represented by a selection of paintings,
furniture and objets d’art which inspired him and beautifully compliment the
fashion displays.

Thursday 7 December, 10:30–
12 noon: Gauguin,
Artist as Alchemist

This new presentation of the work of the great Post-Impressionist
French artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) curated by Gloria Groom of the Art Insitute of Chicago focuses on the
extraordinary range of his work and its uniquely experimental nature. The
artist’s famous paintings are shown along a great many of his wooden and ceramic sculptures, prints,
utilitarian objects and highly original « primitive » decorations.
Gauguin became an artist after traveling the world as a merchant marine and
working as a stockbroker’s assistant. His unconventional artistic path made him
uniquely open to exploring a wide range of materials, including wood, wax, and
ceramics. He
spent the first six years of his life in Peru and, as an adult, lived in Paris,
Brittany, Martinique, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands. In every place, he
absorbed - and reinvented -the local artistic and cultural traditions. Gauguin not
only worked as a painter, sculptor, ceramist, printmaker, and decorator—he also
invented new processes in many of these areas. Sometimes he was responding to
the physical or financial limitations of a place; other times it was his desire
to do what no one had done before.

Tuesday 12 December, 9:30–
11 am: Rubens, Portraits of Princes

In 1621 the widow of King
Henri IV, Marie de Medici invited
the art star of her day, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens to paint the
great cycle of paintings celebrating her life for her new Luxembourg palace.

Set next door to the palace,
the current exhibition illustrates this famous relationship with numerous
portraits of the Queen and her family - King Louis XIII, Queen Anne of Austria
- as well as the kings, queens and princes of Europe related to the Bourbons and the Medici: the Hapsburgs,
Stuarts and Gonzagas.

This is a unique gathering of
grand portraits of the Baroque era featuring also paintings by Rubens’ famous
contemporaries, Pourbus, Champaigne, Velázquez and Van
Dyck.

The return
of the classical style, called Neo-Classicism, begins in architecture under
Louis XV (1755), followed by decoration (1765) and finally painting under Louis
XVI (1780).A certain nostalgia
for the glories of the Grand Siècle but also the influence of the
philosophers and critics preaching a return to virtue and utility favour at
first a royal Neo-Classicism (style Gabriel), followed by an increasingly
austere and grave Neo-Classicism, inspired directly from Greco-Roman antiquity
in the later years of the reign of Louis XV and under Louis XVI (Soufflot,
Gondoin, Chalgrin). Neoclassicism further evolves in a severe, even eccentric
way in the years just before the Revolution in the architecture of the new
Paris city gates (Ledoux).

In
gardening, however, the new English mode of the Romantic garden displaces the
severe symmetries of the French classical garden as witnessed in the
landscaping initiated by Queen Marie-Antoinette in her domain, the Petit
Trianon in Versailles, for which she will also build a charmingly rustic
artificial village, the hameau de la
Reine.

In art
Jacques-Louis David will re-introduce into art classical subjects inspired by
Roman history in a severe but tense style, thus prefiguring the almost romantic
exaltation and feverish atmosphere of the revolutionary period.
Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, on the other hand, invents a tender maternal style for
aristocratic portraiture that perfectly suits the tastes of upper-class ladies
and her greatest patron, Queen Marie Antoinette.

Please
register for classes in advance to ensure that group visits are not full.

*Dimitri Papalexis studied in the finest fashion school in Greece the
PAN-SIK School in Athens in 1986-87 and at the Maragoni School in Milan (1988).
He also studied embroidery at the greatest French embroidery school, Lesage in
1998.
He has taught pattern making,
draping and embroidery at the PAN-SIK School in Athens and has been
creating dresses for Fashion houses, television programs in Greece and an
international private clientele in Paris, Monaco and the U.S.A. since 1987. He
has worked among others for Mariana Hardwick (Australia), Christophe Rouxel
(Paris), Leonard and Osimar Versolato (Paris), Paul KA (Paris) Jean-Louis
Scherrer (Paris), Irène Van Ryb (Paris),123 Créateur (Paris), Eva Kayan
(Marseille) and Un Jour Ailleurs (Paris).His range of creation includes haute-couture embroideries, suits, cocktail and
wedding dresses. He has lectured on the history of fashion for the University
of California in Paris and at the Art Institute of Chicago and regularly for
Paris Art Studies since 2010.